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Lot Essay
Bold and imbued with patriotic exuberance, Albert G. (A.G.) Lawson is a rare and exemplary painting by James Bard. The oversized scale of the vessel in relation to the river, its meticulously drafted profile set against a simplified landscape, and the whimsically caricatured crew are details that distinguish Bard as the premier nineteenth-century American ship portraitist. Born in 1815, just eight years after Robert Fulton sent the Clermont up the Hudson on its maiden voyage, Bard witnessed the birth and growth of American industrialization and the dramatic evolution of the nation’s shipping industry.
By the time Bard painted the present work in 1868, sailing vessels had largely fallen out of favor on the Hudson River. Steamboats and railroads dominated its waters and shores, a shift reflected in Bard’s prolific oeuvre. Of the nearly 4,000 works attributed to him, only “some twenty oils of schooners and sloops” are known (Peluso, 1997, p. 73), making this painting a particularly rare and compelling composition.
As recorded in the Forty-Third Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, A.G. Lawson was built in 1868 in Newburgh, New York. She measured 86 feet in length, weighed 94 gross tons, and carried a crew of three (Bureau of Navigation, Washington, D.C., 1911, p. 5, no. 1722). She was also exceptionally fast. A notice in the New York Herald on June 24, 1868, announced “a grand scrub race – open to all working schooners… The schooners Albert Lawson… now entered.” A.G. Lawson sailed and won the twenty-mile windward race on the Hudson River in both 1869 and 1870 (Peluso, p. 74). Bard underscores the schooner’s speed through the taut, narrow wake that trails behind it, as the vessel cuts through the waves with striking ease and grace.
By the time Bard painted the present work in 1868, sailing vessels had largely fallen out of favor on the Hudson River. Steamboats and railroads dominated its waters and shores, a shift reflected in Bard’s prolific oeuvre. Of the nearly 4,000 works attributed to him, only “some twenty oils of schooners and sloops” are known (Peluso, 1997, p. 73), making this painting a particularly rare and compelling composition.
As recorded in the Forty-Third Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, A.G. Lawson was built in 1868 in Newburgh, New York. She measured 86 feet in length, weighed 94 gross tons, and carried a crew of three (Bureau of Navigation, Washington, D.C., 1911, p. 5, no. 1722). She was also exceptionally fast. A notice in the New York Herald on June 24, 1868, announced “a grand scrub race – open to all working schooners… The schooners Albert Lawson… now entered.” A.G. Lawson sailed and won the twenty-mile windward race on the Hudson River in both 1869 and 1870 (Peluso, p. 74). Bard underscores the schooner’s speed through the taut, narrow wake that trails behind it, as the vessel cuts through the waves with striking ease and grace.